UKRAINE: Draft law on regional & minority languages under fire. Which solution?
By Willy Fautré, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers (Brussels) and former chargé de mission of the Cabinet of the Ministry of Education and the Belgian Government (*)
HRWF (11.11.2025) – On 13 October 2025, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine registered in the Verkhovna Rada draft law No. 14120 (**) revising the minority languages to be protected in conformity with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. (***)
The revised proposed list of minority languages to be protected
If adopted, the draft law would apply on the following languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Crimean Tatar, Modern Greek, German, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, and Hebrew.
It is to be noted that Crimean Tatar and Czech languages are added to the list but that Jewish (Yiddish) was renamed Hebrew and the name “Moldovan” disppeared.
Criticism immediately erupted accusing Ukraine of excluding the language of the Moldovan minority and the Russian language from the protection of the European Charter.
Two issues need to be analyzed.
Why did the Moldovan language disappear from the list and what is the status of the language of the Moldovan minority in Ukraine?
Is the exclusion of the Russian language legal according to the European Charter or legitimate?
What is the state language of Moldova?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Declaration of Independence of Moldova (27 August 1991) declared that the state language was the Romanian language.
However, the Constitution of Moldova adopted on 29 July 1994 stated in Article 13(1): “The state language of the Republic of Moldova is the Moldovan language, and its writing is based on the Latin alphabet.”
In December 2013, the Constitutional Court of Moldova ruled that the Declaration of Independence takes precedence over the Constitution in matters of the state language, and therefore the “Romanian language” is the official state language.
On 16 March 2023 the Parliament passed a law to replace in all legislation (including the Constitution) the phrase “Moldovan language” with “Romanian language”. It was published in the Official Gazette on 24 March 2023.
On 15 January 2025, the Constitutional Court of Moldova confirmed that the state language was the Romanian language.
The change has symbolic, linguistic and political significance.
Noteworthy is the unchanged presence of the Gagauz language in the Ukrainian draft law.
The autonomous region Gagauzia in Moldova is legally recognised by the Law on the Special Status of Gagauzia (No. 344-XIII of 23 December 1994). Its population (about 110,400 inhabitants) speaks a form of Turkic language identified as Oghuz but they are primarily Orthodox. The Church in Gagauzia is part of the dominant pro-Russian Moldovan Orthodox Church under the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church supporting Putin’s war on Ukraine.
In Moldova, Gagauz is officially recognised as one of the languages of Gagauzia (alongside the state language of Moldova and Russian) but the practical usage, especially in education, public life and inter-ethnic communication, is much weaker than the legal status would suggest.
In conclusion, it is therefore not true that Ukraine excluded the state language of Moldova from the minority languages to be protected on its territory.
The Russian language in Ukraine, an insoluble demographic state of play
The most recent (and only) complete population census for Ukraine was conducted in 2001. Since then, no full national census has been carried out. About 25 years later, a whole generation of old (Sovietized and Russified) people has been slowly disappearing while a young generation has been educated in schools in the Ukrainian language and has integrated a Ukrainian identity. For these and other reasons, it can be expected that the 2001 statistics have dramatically changed.
The Ukrainian language along with the Ukrainian cultural self-identification must have been boosted upwards while the Russian language along with the Russian/ Soviet self-identification was sharply decreasing, especially since Russia’s invasion and partial occupation of Ukraine.
This trend is confirmed by the latest results of a survey conducted by the sociological group Rating in August 2022: nowadays, 58% of Ukrainians speak only Ukrainian at home and only 9% of Ukrainians only use the Russian language in everyday life. From these figures, the number of Ukrainians speaking both languages to varying degrees in daily life could easily be deduced.
It is however impossible to make a comparison with the situation in 2001 as the mainly Russian-speaking regions of Donbass and Crimea have been respectively partly or fully occupied and depopulated by Russia. Moreover, millions of Ukrainians live outside the country.
In the current territorial and demographic context of a country under threat of ongoing occupation, it is impossible to gather reliable statistics. However, the status of the Russian language until now and tomorrow in the sovereign part of Ukraine raises a number of questions. Is the European Charter one of the books of a “democracy Bible” out of which there is no salvation?
Is the European Charter a Bible or a Sacred Scripture?
The Council of Europe has nowadays 46 Member States. Only 25 States – including no more than 16 out of 27 EU Member States – have ratified the Charter, including Ukraine: Armenia, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.
France (1999) and Italy (1998) signed but never ratified the Charter.
12 States have neither signed nor ratified the Charter: Andorra, Belgium, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Monaco, Portugal, San Marino, and Turkey.
Can it be said that the CoE Member States having ratified the Charter satisfactorily implement it? Not necessarily but their status in international institutions has not been suspended.
Can it be said that the States which have not signed or ratified the Charter are not democracies? They are and their membership in international institutions has not been questioned or changed.
Can it be said that linguistic minorities are oppressed in those democratic countries and that their societies have dangerously lost their social cohesion? International human rights reports are not saying that they are countries of particular concern.
Belgium, which is one of the founding Member States of the EU and hosts the major EU institutions, has neither signed nor ratified the European Charter but it has shown enough political will, determination and perseverance to review and deeply reform the architecture of the State. This took several decades but the linguistic issues do not represent any more a pressing threat of dislocation of the country and its society despite its linguistic, cultural, economic and political diversity.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is not a sacred text or a sacred cow but it gives orientations and guidelines enabling States in search of solutions to meet the needs of the users of regional or minority languages inside their legitimate and sovereign borders.
The practice of a number of States having chosen, for various reasons, not to sign or ratify the European Charter shows that it is possible to greatly satisfy the expectations of users of languages having a historical presence on their territory. Belgium is not the sole example.
This is a way that Ukraine should exploit to find its own solution to the issue of its 9% monolingual Russian-speaking citizens, about 3,5 million people according to the current demographic situation.
Is it the Russian language or the users of the Russian language that must be protected in Ukraine?
If the focus is on the users rather than on the language itself, the discussion can be moved away from the confrontation on the concepts of minority language and regional language. A new space of discussion could hereby be opened to look for a solution outside the scope of the European Charter.
In this case, a number of questions arise before opening a discussion and must be answered. Is there an organized group of users of the Russian language who expect to further feel wronged by the upcoming law 14120? If so, what are their concrete grievances and demands? What demographic weight do they represent in the current borders of the sovereign Ukrainian State. It can indeed be expected that they will not be a regionally located homogeneous group and that they will not be superimposable on one or several ethnic groups.
The contribution of think tanks in Ukraine would be needed to answer such questions and to explore alternative solutions outside the terminology and the litteral reading of the European Charter. The purpose of this mechanism was designed and drafted in peacetimes to avoid civil wars and to guarantee social cohesion inside states, not for the exceptional case of a sovereign state invaded by a neighbouring country which had colonized it during centuries, imposed its language on its populations and is trying to do the same again in the 2020s.
Human Rights Without Frontiers is also willing to participate in this effort, by opening its columns to meaningful papers and organizing a webinar.
(*) The author was involved, as a chargé de mission of the Cabinet of the Ministry of Education and afterwards of the Belgian State, in projects aiming at bringing the various linguistic communities of Belgium closer to each other in the mid-1980s at a time when Belgium was engaged in a painful process of revision of its constitution and building a new State architecture. This political process took a few decades.
He was also one of the six founding members of the “Centre d’Animation en Langues” and a member of the board for 30 years.”From 1980 to 2010, this civic multi-lingual association, which occupied over 40 staff, promoted the learning of the languages of the other linguistic communities of the country among various segments of society, such as youth and lawmakers.
(**) Draft Law on Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine in Connection with the Update of the Official Translation of the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages
(***) Called “European Charter” or “Charter” in the rest of the article.
Photo: State Committee of Ukraine for Nationalities and Religions in Kyiv(Credit: Willy Fautré)
